For years, some of the most dangerous hacking threats have come from hostile nation-state hackers espionage, Russian ransomware gangs targeting critical infrastructure, and governments targeting journalists with spyware that can punch the security of almost any phone.
However, the new phenomenon of young English-speaking adults and teen hackers has become a global threat to today’s top press, spanning cybercrime, child abuse and extremism.
By tearing apart some of the big businesses, tech giants and governments, these young, financially motivated hackers have smashed their networks and forced hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy corporate victims.
One of the few companies looking at this subculture is Unit 221B, a New Jersey-based security company, tracking these hackers and disrupting businesses that others struggle with or completely fail.
Investors notified the security company. Unit 221B said it raised a $5 million seed round from J2 Ventures. Its general partner Christine Keung said the company is “a puzzle piece with a lack of threat confusion and belonging.”
Law enforcement has been paving the way for some of the world’s biggest hacks to date, including dozens of corporate giants whose snowflake cloud accounts have been hacked and ransomware attacks on MGM resorts, as it is slow to combat threats from these “advanced, persistent teenagers.”
In some cases, hackers have stole a monumental amount of people’s personal data, disrupting businesses, due to the long spells that prompted economic warnings across the country.
221B helped break law enforcement deadlock in multiple investigations, the company’s top brass told TechCrunch by ensuring significant arrests of high-profile hackers associated with scattered spiders known as COM and the wider, obscure cybercrime community. This is thanks to its flagship threat intelligence platform Ewitness and its diverse team of hackers, engineers and forensics experts.
The company also supports legal victory and recovery of financial losses based on the findings of its investigation.
The $5 million seed funds will be used to expand and improve the ewitness threat intelligence platform with the aim of helping law enforcement and government investigators track and arrest malicious hackers faster.
“The problem we are solving is the sharpest way of how the online threat situation has evolved – not only did there be a few years ago that young people who can cause very high harm in both the real world and the online world.”
“We’re focusing on that current issue,” said Chen Contino.
Ewitness is an invitation-only software platform that collects a large amount of threat intelligence (information that can be used to track malicious threat actors across the web) from trusted sources such as police, journalists, and security researchers. The platform is intended to facilitate investigators to identify and track these threats, collect and store information for case construction, and hand over information to others for additional work.
The platform is also used by private companies, including the Fortune 500. Fortune 500 uses collected intelligence to track threats from these groups, such as how often brands and industry verticals are targeted or compromised.
Alison Nixon, Chief Research Officer of Unit 221B and a leading expert on English-speaking hacking threats, told TechCrunch that COM “continues to grow on the same trajectory as before,” said funding would further support the ability of investigators to help arrest English-speaking threats.
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